Asian Developers Big on Flash, Eclipse, Wireless

A new study shows that developers in Asia are heavy users of Flash and Eclipse, and they are more likely to work on mobile applications than their counterparts in North America.

A recent study by Evans Data shows that Asian developers are heavy users of the Adobe Flash and Eclipse open-source platforms, and are also focusing on building wireless applications.
Evans Data, of Santa Cruz, Calif., on Dec. 6 announced the results of its APAC (Asia Pacific) Development Survey, which showed that development for the Flash platform in Asia is twice that of North America or Europe. Indeed, two-thirds of Asian developers surveyed said they either use or are planning to use Adobes Flash. Forty percent of APAC developers use Flash and another 27 percent plan to adopt it in the near future, the survey showed

In addition, more than 30 percent of Asian developers surveyed said they plan to use Macromedia Studio 8, another Adobe product.

Meanwhile, the biannual survey showed that Eclipse usage has grown by 80 percent in the last six months and is now the most popular IDE (integrated development environment) in the region next to Microsofts Visual Studio.
Moreover, 70 percent of Asian developers surveyed said they use open-source code in their applications, which is up from 50 percent in 2003.

The study also showed that Asian developers tend to be more likely to work on mobile applications than are North American developers. Indeed, according to the survey, 35 percent of APAC developers are currently developing software for mobile devices, and 45 percent of that software is rich clientbased.
"The APAC region continues to lead the other regions in adoption of rich client development for both the Web and mobile areas", said John Andrews, president of Evans Data, in a statement. "This region has taken advantage of all the ways you can now create applications with interactive functionality that are easily deployed and upgraded on the Web and mobile devices."
The study also indicated that by next year, 52 percent of APAC developers expect to be using XML.
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Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.